Jørgen

Married. Carnivore, Coffee, Fitness, Health, Longevity, & Fun. ChemE, love learning. 1A+2A+10A, Navy Vet, aspiring farmer. Politics @yorgenbean2. Wisconsin!

[Conor Harris @Conor_Harris_]

90% of people need more of this in their hip mobility work 👇

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

At the end of every meal in Japan,
people put their palms together, bow their heads,
and whisper one word:

"Gochisousama."

Most tourists learn it as "Thank you for the meal."
That translation misses the entire soul of the language.

Look at the kanji characters:
馳 (chi) and 走 (sou).
Both mean the exact same thing: to gallop. To run hard.

"Chisou" literally means running around frantically.

Centuries ago, before refrigeration or supermarkets,
putting a warm meal on a table meant someone had to run:
the farmer sweating in muddy paddy fields,
the fisherman fighting waves at 3:00 a.m.,
the horse courier galloping between towns with fresh ingredients,
the cook standing in choking smoke over an open fire.

When you say Gochisousama, you are not saying "the food was tasty."

You are bowing to every pair of feet
that ran across the earth so you could eat tonight.

And you leave not a single grain of rice in the bowl.

Because leaving a grain behind
means someone ran for nothing.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The strangest thing in the carnivore community has nothing to do with weight, and nobody official will touch it.

People stop burning.

It starts as a throwaway line in a post about something else. Out all day, forgot the cream, nothing happened.

Then it is a man who used to catch it walking to the car, standing in the sun for two hours and coming in brown.

Then it is fair skinned northerners in Spain with no factor 50 and no aloe vera evening afterwards.

Then it is the gingers.

Actual gingers. People who have spent their entire lives being told they have no business outdoors after ten in the morning, reporting that they now tan.

That is the point where you stop filing it under wishful thinking.

They were not looking for it. They went carnivore for their gut or their weight, and the sun thing turned up on its own, uninvited, which is not how placebo tends to work.

The explanations offered so far have been generous.

It is the calorie deficit. Sunlight, famously, respects a deficit.

It is placebo. Thousands of people are imagining that their skin is not blistering.

They are secretly staying indoors. All of them. In summer. While posting photographs of themselves outdoors.

Or your skin is built out of the fat you eat.

Cell membranes are made of fatty acids, and they are made of whichever ones you supplied. Fill them with sunflower and rapeseed oil, the least stable fats on the shelf, the ones that go rancid in a cupboard, then aim ultraviolet light at them. Fill them with butter, tallow and ruminant fat, which sit in a jar on the counter quite happily, and see whether the same thing happens.

We changed the building material in the seventies. Sun exposure has fallen since. Skin cancer has not.

Nobody in dermatology wants that sentence within a mile of them.

I burned every summer as a child. Six years here, no sunscreen, not once, and I am not unusual in this crowd.

Take a year off the seed oils, then go and sit in your own garden in July and find out for yourself. Nobody can stop you running that experiment.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

An old heart is brown, a pathologist can guess the age of the owner from the shade, and the brown is fat that went rancid inside the muscle and stuck.

The pigment has a name. Lipofuscin. It is polyunsaturated fat that oxidised, broke into aldehydes, and welded itself to protein.

The cell cannot digest it. Nothing can. It sits in the cell for the rest of the cell's life, and in cells that never divide, heart muscle, nerve cells, the retina, the rest of the life is your life.

So it accumulates, year on year, from the first bottle of sunflower oil onwards, and by old age it crowds the cell, in the heart, in the brain, in the eye.

The retina is the most polyunsaturated tissue in the body, it sits behind a lens that focuses light straight onto it, and every day the cells behind it eat the worn-out fat and try to break it down.

The part they cannot break down glows. Shine a blue light into the back of an eye and the lipofuscin fluoresces, which is how a clinic photographs how much has piled up.

Where it piles up, the retina dies from behind. That is macular degeneration, the commonest cause of blindness in the over 60s, and the advice for it is sunglasses.

Sunglasses. For a pigment made of rancid oil.

Your grandfather read the paper in the garden without them, on a retina built from dripping and butter, and kept the eyesight to read it at ninety.

The sun has not changed. The fat behind the lens has.

[Daniel Tawfik @dantawfik]

You train to protect your mitochondria from aging. And it works. Exercise preserves mitochondrial energy production into your 90s. But a 2025 study by @GGouspillou and colleagues reveals there's a second mitochondrial function that declines with age no matter how much you exercise.

Gouspillou and his colleagues at Université du Québec à Montréal divided 139 men aged 20 to 93 into active and inactive groups. They measured physical performance, muscle composition, and three critical mitochondrial functions: energy production, free radical generation, and calcium handling capacity.

The conventional wisdom says mitochondria wear out with age, becoming a leaky metabolic engine that produces more oxidative stress and becomes less capable of taking nutrients and converting them into ATP.

Direct measurement across 73 years of aging shows that's not necessarily correct.

Mitochondrial energy production stayed completely stable in active participants from their 20s through their 90s.

A 90-year-old who stayed active had mitochondria that produced energy like a 20-year-old. Inactive individuals showed declining energy production, but it tracked with how little they moved, not how many years they'd lived.

When normalized to mitochondrial content, the differences disappeared entirely. The study suggests that aging doesn't break energy production. Physical inactivity reduces how many mitochondria you maintain. Each individual mitochondrion works just as well at 90 as at 20.

Free radical production, blamed for decades as an aging driver, showed no increase with age. Active participants actually produced more free radicals than inactive individuals while displaying superior strength and performance. The free radical theory of muscle aging didn't hold.

The study had some interesting headlines:

• Physical activity protects performance across the lifespan but doesn't completely prevent age-related decline

• Mitochondrial energy production depends on activity level, not chronological age

• Free radical production remains stable with aging and reflects mitochondrial health, not damage

• Mitochondrial calcium handling capacity drops sharply after age 60 in both active and inactive individuals

• Reduced calcium handling correlates with lower muscle mass, strength, and performance

• Deterioration accelerates dramatically after 60 rather than declining gradually

The calcium handling finding represents the first mitochondrial function that deteriorates with aging regardless of exercise. Mitochondria normally act as calcium buffers, absorbing excess calcium to keep cells functioning properly. When this buffering capacity fails, a protective channel called the permeability transition pore opens too easily.

Think of it like a circuit breaker that's supposed to trip only during emergencies but starts tripping at lower and lower thresholds. When the pore opens prematurely, stored calcium floods back into the cell, triggering a cascade of damage.

This calcium release activates pathways that break down muscle protein faster than the body builds it back up. It generates bursts of oxidative stress that damage cellular components. It releases mitochondrial DNA that the immune system mistakes for bacterial invasion, triggering inflammation.

Each pathway drives muscle loss without requiring energy failure. The mitochondria still produce ATP normally. They've just lost the ability to prevent calcium from activating destructive programs that eat away at muscle tissue.

The study measured calcium handling by exposing muscle mitochondria to calcium loads and tracking retention. Both active and inactive participants showed declining capacity, but the pattern matters. Calcium handling remained relatively stable from ages 20 to 60, then dropped sharply after 70.

Calcium retention capacity correlated with thigh muscle mass, knee strength, walking distance, and mobility performance. It also correlated with GDF15, a stress molecule that rises with aging and predicts worse health outcomes. This suggests calcium handling directly influences muscle health and systemic aging markers.

Physical activity protected functional performance. Active participants outperformed inactive individuals on strength and mobility tests across all age groups. But both groups showed age-related declines. Exercise delays deterioration but doesn't eliminate it.

Muscle fiber composition revealed how activity and aging affect muscle differently. Active young adults had more type I endurance fibers that stayed stable across decades. Inactive individuals showed fiber type changes suggesting nerve disconnection from muscle that active individuals avoided.

Intermuscular fat, the marbling that accumulates in muscle tissue, increased with aging in both groups. But physical activity provided protection in later decades. Older active individuals had less fat infiltration than older inactive individuals, though the protective effect only emerged after years of consistent activity.

The implications challenge decades of research direction. Drug development targeting mitochondrial energy production in aging muscle produced zero effective treatments. This study suggests those efforts addressed the wrong problem. Energy production itself doesn't decline with healthy aging.

Calcium handling deterioration appears to be the actual mechanism driving muscle loss.

Restoring calcium buffering capacity or preventing the permeability transition pore from opening prematurely may represent more effective intervention points than trying to boost energy production or mitochondrial numbers.

There are some limitations that stand out when you read the paper:

First, only men participated. So findings may not apply equally to women.

Participants were relatively healthy community-dwelling adults, not people with severe muscle wasting. The design prevents establishing whether calcium handling failure causes muscle loss or just accompanies it.

With that being said, the data fundamentally reframe what aging does to muscle. Energy failure on per mitochondria level isn't the driver in healthy aging. Inactivity reduces mitochondrial numbers while aging leaves energy production intact. The exception, calcium handling deterioration occurring regardless of activity, appears to be where aging actually operates.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

"They didn't get heart disease and cancer in the past because they weren't living long enough to get them."

Third time this week. It turns up within four replies of anything I post, always from someone who thinks he has just closed the case.

The most common age of death in England in 1841, for anyone who got past ten, was 75.6.

That is the government's own number, on the government's own website, where it has been sitting the entire time.

Forty is the life expectancy at birth, and it is an average, and averages are stupid in a way people refuse to accept about them. Bury a hundred babies and a hundred pensioners in the same parish and the average comes out at thirty-eight, and nobody in that parish died at thirty-eight.

Take the infants out and the whole argument falls over. A child in 1841 who made it to five had a coin-flip chance of reaching sixty. No antibiotics, cholera in the water, and a tenth of the cohort made eighty.

And they still miss the actual point, which is that these are not diseases of time. They are diseases of a body being fed something it was never built to run on.

Type 2 diabetes used to be called adult-onset diabetes. They had to change the name. Somebody sat in a committee and formally renamed a disease, in the medical literature, because eleven-year-olds kept turning up with it and the old name was getting embarrassing to say out loud in a children's clinic.

That is not a disease waiting for people to get old. That is a disease that stopped waiting.

Meanwhile a research team took CT scanners into the Bolivian Amazon and scanned the Tsimane. Two thirds of the over-seventy-fives had no coronary calcium whatsoever. A Tsimane grandmother of eighty has the arteries of an American woman in her fifties.

She got old. She got old without any of it.

Our ancestors were not dying before they had a chance to get sick. They were dying of things we have since fixed, and living into their seventies without the things we have since invented.

The eleven-year-old in the diabetes clinic did not get there by living too long.

[Gun Owners of America @GunOwners]

Gun registration is unconstitutional. So gun owners shouldn't have to worry about whether their names, addresses, or guns are caught up in an ATF data leak.

ATF needs to delete its unconstitutional registries ASAP.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

🚨 China is quietly shifting into FULL wartime footing.

Beijing just overhauled its National Defense Mobilization Law for the first time in 16 years (effective Oct 1).

The moment mobilization is triggered:
▫️ Mandatory service: Men 18–60 & Women 18–55
▫️ Instant seizure: Private vehicles, property, tech & data
▫️ Total takeover: Banks, internet, energy & food supplies

Brutal military purges.
Civilian tech and drones weaponized by law.

Xi Jinping is 73. His biological clock is ticking, and his window to take Taiwan is closing fast.

Beijing isn't preparing for deterrence. They are preparing to strike as early as next year.

Are we watching the final countdown? 🇨🇳⚠️

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A superfood is not discovered. It is commissioned, and one family in California did the whole thing in public.

Stewart and Lynda Resnick bought a pistachio orchard with some pomegranate trees on it and kept them because the return per acre was better. Then Lynda Resnick did the thing she is genuinely brilliant at. She went and bought the science.

By 2012 they had put more than $35 million into pomegranate research and had 70 studies published in peer-reviewed journals. In 2007 the company spent more on research than on advertising, $17 million against $12 million, and she said publicly that she was proud of it. One peer reviewer rejected a manuscript for being excessively advocatory of pomegranate juice as a treatment for prostate cancer. It was published elsewhere.

Then the advertising, quoting the research they had paid for. The juice could treat, prevent or reduce the risk of heart disease. Prostate cancer. Erectile dysfunction. Clinically proven. One billboard put the little bottle under a hangman's noose and the words Cheat Death.

The Federal Trade Commission found deceptive claims across 36 advertisements and promotional materials. The order named both Resnicks personally and runs for twenty years. In 2015 the DC Circuit affirmed it. In 2016 the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.

After the ruling, they gave UCLA $4 million to start a Food Law and Policy Program.

And none of that is the expensive part.

The Wonderful Company holds around 185,000 acres of California, fifteen million trees drinking on the order of 120 billion gallons a year, more than any other private interest in the American West. To feed it they hold a 57% controlling stake in the Kern Water Bank, 32 square miles storing up to 1.5 million acre-feet underground, built with over $70 million of state money for public drought relief and handed into private control in 1994.

So when the droughts came the family holding the bank were insulated from the thing everyone else was suffering, and could sell water back into the system that had paid to dig it. In a bad year they outbid every other farmer in the valley. Neighbours grub out orchards. The nut acreage stays in the ground.

That is what the little bottle costs.

The verdict changed nothing. It sits in the chiller today at the same price, beside the word antioxidant, sold to people who have never heard of the Kern Water Bank and could not find Kern County on a map of the state whose drought they read about every summer.

A superfood is a crop somebody owns a lot of, with a laboratory on retainer and a media buy behind it.

Nobody has ever had to buy 70 studies to make people eat beef.

[Conor Harris @Conor_Harris_]

These 3 muscles are the keys to unlocking healthier shoulders 👇

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

These books will give you a better education than virtually any school curriculum in the West today.

You can now go from kindergarten to PhD without reading one word of Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, or Milton...

We set up this book club to fight back. If schools and universities won't teach the Great Books, we must form our own reading circles independently.

Below are some of the key texts on our reading list. We are studying these carefully and intentionally, in dialogue with each other. The kind of reading that forms the mind and shapes the spirit.

We are reading The Brothers Karamazov currently. Next week, we will vote on our next book.

Join our reading group and study the greats with us.

Take out a paid subscription to support us and join the discussions directly — it makes a huge difference to the time and resources we can dedicate.

You'll get:

- Live book club discussions (biweekly)
- Access to our incredible community chat
- Essays to guide you through the Great Books
- All past recordings, essays, and podcasts
- Ability to vote on what we read next

https://t.co/efQaicNvay

Welcome!

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

The worldwide influence of modern globalism now supercedes the democratic foundations of the nation-state.

Behind the closed doors of international summits, unelected policy architects construct sweeping climate frameworks that obligate sovereign nations to comply with top-down mandates. These agendas frequently exceed the explicit democratic mandates given to Western governments by their own electorates.

To the average citizen, these architects remain distant figures, insulated from the direct consequences of public policy. Yet they function as the prime movers of a globalised regulatory apparatus. The rise of this structure represents an unprecedented transfer of decision-making power—and national wealth—away from local parliaments and the people, and into the hands of international powerbrokers and their institutions.

The contradictions of this global apparatus are most evident in its industrial style of execution. Western net-zero mandates rely overwhelmingly on technologies manufactured in regions subject to far lower regulatory burdens. Much of western industry is in chronic decline.

* Fully 90% of the world’s wind turbines and solar components are manufactured in China.
* This 'green' supply chain is underwritten by a massive expansion of domestic coal-fired power stations in non-Western nations, like China and India.
* While Western economies face strict emissions limits and rising energy costs, the primary manufacturing hubs driving the transition operate outside comparable constraints, creating a severe competitive and strategic imbalance.

At its core, this brand of totalitarian globalism rests on the conviction that their centralised managerial class is better suited to running the world than mere sovereign citizens. Populations are no longer viewed as self-governing, and with inherent liberties and local priorities, but rather as economic units and carbon metrics to be optimised, managed and regulated.

From dictating agricultural policy and food production, to restricting traditional energy sources, this technocratic agenda systematically narrows individual choice under the banner of the 'greater good'.

Accountable to no single electorate, this system replaces open parliamentary debate with administrative consensus, casting any defense of national sovereignty or individual freedom as an obstacle to progress.

The multilateral framework is actively sustained and expanded by key figures across international bodies, finance and policy networks:

António Guterres: A lifelong socialist, and now UN Secretary-General, leading global multilateral messaging.
Hoesung Lee: Former IPCC Chair framing scientific consensus for policy implementation.
Christiana Figueres & Laurence Tubiana: Key diplomats behind the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Michael Bloomberg & John Kerry: Special envoys leveraging diplomatic and municipal networks.
Mark Carney: Steering international banking and investment criteria toward climate metrics.
Klaus Schwab: Founder of the World Economic Forum, advancing public-private global governance.
Bill Gates & Al Gore: Funding policy initiatives, land acquisitions, and global activist training.
Johan Rockström: Driving theoretical frameworks like 'planetary boundaries' to guide global policy.

[Vinnie Tortorich @VinnieTortorich]

The woman who led the design of America's food pyramid spent her later years saying one thing. The version you were taught was not hers.

Luise Light was a nutritionist recruited by the USDA in the early 1980s to lead the team building America's new food guide. By her own published account, her team's version put 5 to 9 daily servings of fruits and vegetables at the base, with grains as a small allowance, strictly whole grain.

Then, she says, the guide came back from the Secretary of Agriculture's office changed. Grains, any grains, refined included, inflated to 6 to 11 servings a day and moved to the base of the pyramid. Her fruits and vegetables cut back. "Eat less" softened into "avoid too much."

She wrote that she protested at the time, warning the changes would lead to an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. She called the refined-grain load frightening, because the body processes it like sugar.

The industry pressure is documented beyond her account: the pyramid's 1991 release was withdrawn under meat and dairy lobby pressure and re-released in 1992 after nearly a million dollars of re-testing. Every American classroom got the result.

The USDA maintains the pyramid reflected the science of its era. Look at the era that followed, and decide how her warning aged. Hers had vegetables at the bottom. Yours had bread.

#NSNG #NoSugarNoGrains #foodpyramid #usda #nutrition #bigfood #realfood #vinnietortorich

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There is exactly one nut or seed I would grudgingly put in a trolley, and the rest can stay on the shelf.

Polyunsaturated fat per 100g:

Walnuts: 47g
Pine nuts: 34g
Flaxseed: 29g
Brazil nuts: 24g
Sunflower seeds: 23g
Pecans: 22g
Pumpkin seeds: 21g
Peanuts: 16g
Almonds: 12g
Cashews: 8g
Hazelnuts: 8g
Macadamias: 1.5g

Everything above the last line is a bottle of seed oil that has not been pressed yet.

Then the macadamia, sat at the bottom on its own, with a fat profile that reads like an animal got into the orchard.

Seventy six grams of fat and only a gram and a half of it fragile. Forty four grams of oleic acid, the fat in olive oil and in beef. Seventeen grams of palmitoleic acid, which you otherwise meet in beef fat and dairy and almost nowhere else that grows.

It carries the least phytate on that list as well. Almonds and Brazil nuts arrive loaded with the stuff, which is how a plant holds onto its own zinc, iron and magnesium while you chew through it and take home a fraction of what the label promised. The macadamia barely bothers, because it put its energy into fat instead.

It is also the only one you can leave in a warm cupboard without it turning. A walnut is halfway to rancid before it reaches your kitchen, and that is the same chemistry that got it on the front of the health magazine.

I would still rather have the ribeye. I am not running a religion though, and if something is coming out of that aisle, make it the one doing an impression of a cow.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

High reps feel harder, which is why the industry sells them and why they keep losing to the heavy set that was over in twenty seconds.

Why people do high reps:

- It hurts, and pain feels like progress
- The pump, which is water and gone by teatime
- Everybody else is doing it
- The man selling it also sells the recovery powder
- Heavy is frightening, and nobody admits that one
- Five reps looks like powerlifting, and they want to look like a bodybuilder

Why the heavy set wins:

- Muscle grows from tension, not from suffering
- A heavy load puts that tension on the fibre from the first rep
- Fewer reps to get it, so less fatigue arrives with it
- Less fatigue means you recover
- Recovered means you can go again on Thursday
- The bar tells you plainly whether you got stronger

A set of twenty gives you a burning sensation, a heart rate and something to talk about. A set of five gives you a number that either went up or it did not.

One of those is measurable and the other one is a feeling, and the industry has built forty years of revenue on which one people prefer.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The plant-based longevity argument rests on five places where nobody can prove how old anybody is.

That is the whole of it. Every documentary, every retreat, every book about beans and purpose and moving naturally, every doctor on a stage with a photograph of a smiling old man behind him, traces back to a handful of regions selected because they reported unusual numbers of people over a hundred.

Saul Newman at University College London did the job nobody else had bothered with, which was to check whether the old men were old.

What actually predicts a region producing supercentenarians:

- High poverty
- No birth certificates
- Bad death registration
- Relatively few people aged 90
- Short life expectancy for its own country

Diet is nowhere on that list. Neither is exercise, wine, sunshine, community, purpose, or any of the other furniture they sell you on the way out of the gift shop.

Of the world's exhaustively validated supercentenarians, 18 per cent hold a birth certificate. America has over 500 of them and seven certificates between the lot.

Their birthdays cluster on the first of the month and on dates divisible by five, which is what a number looks like when it was remembered rather than recorded.

Introduce birth certificates to a region and its supply of 110-year-olds falls by between 69 and 82 per cent. The beans stayed. The centenarians left.

Japan went through its own registers in 2010 and could not account for more than two hundred thousand people listed as being over a hundred. Nobody has suggested the Okinawan diet is responsible for that.

Sardinia, Okinawa and Ikaria came out poorer, less literate, more criminal and shorter-lived than their own national averages. Those are not the conditions that produce the oldest people on earth. They are the conditions that produce the worst records on earth, and for twenty years the second thing has been read as the first.

Newman took the first Ig Nobel Prize in Demography for this in 2024, and thanked the world's oldest man for having three birthdays.

Twenty years, four hundred cookbooks, a Netflix series and a chain of certified longevity towns, built on villages that could not tell you what year it was.

The old man in the photograph is real enough.

The number printed underneath him came from his family, and there is a pension attached to it.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Every time an animal food was taken off the nation's plate, a company was already standing there with the replacement made, priced and waiting.

When butter was condemned, Unilever had Flora on the shelf, sold on the polyunsaturates.

When dripping went, Procter and Gamble had Crisco in the tin, made from cottonseed oil, which was a byproduct of their soap.

When the egg was cut to three a week, Kellogg's had been on the breakfast table since 1906.

When beef tallow came out of the fryers in 1990, Cargill and ADM had the soybean oil in the tanker.

When suet was declared a problem, Atora had a vegetable version ready, and put the word light on it.

When cream was reconsidered, Unilever had Elmlea, which is buttermilk and vegetable oil sold in the cream fridge at cream prices.

When liver left the plate, Roche was the largest vitamin manufacturer on earth, and was later fined for running a price-fixing cartel in the things it sold you instead.

When raw milk was legislated away, Nestlé had been selling infant formula since 1867.

When the Sunday joint got smaller, Birds Eye had the freezer aisle already stocked.

Not one of those was invented in response to the advice. Every one of them existed first, sat unloved for a generation, and then had a market handed to it.

A soap company sold America its cooking fat. A margarine company explained the dangers of butter. A vitamin company benefited from the decline of the food that had made vitamins unnecessary.

None of them had to lie. They only had to be ready, and to wait for somebody else to say it.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1938 a committee of psychiatrists told the British government that bombing would produce three times as many mental casualties as physical ones. Three to four million cases in the first six months.

The state believed them and built a network of emergency psychiatric clinics outside the city centres, staffed and waiting for the collapse.

The bombs came. Forty thousand civilians killed in eight months. A million London homes damaged or destroyed. People slept in the Underground, came up to find the street gone, and went to work.

The clinics closed for lack of patients. In the first three months of the Blitz London recorded around two cases of bomb neurosis a week. Suicides fell. Drunkenness fell.

That is a population on dripping, offal, eggs, whole milk and Sunday joints, being bombed nightly, and not breaking.

Their grandchildren: over eight million adults in England on antidepressants, close to ninety million prescriptions a year, one in five people aged eight to twenty-five with a probable mental disorder. Warm, fed, housed, at peace, and being bombed by nobody.

Everybody has an explanation ready. Phones, housing, the news, atomised communities. All real, and none of them the one nobody will say out loud.

We changed the fuel supply to the organ that does the feeling.

Your brain is two per cent of your bodyweight and takes a fifth of your energy at rest. Every thought, every mood, every act of holding yourself together under pressure is ATP, and ATP is made by mitochondria. A neuron carries thousands. When they run well you are resilient. When they do not, no amount of character makes up the difference.

Mitochondria have their own signature fat in the inner membrane, called cardiolipin, and the entire electron transport chain is embedded in it. Cardiolipin is assembled out of whatever fat you have been eating. The membrane your energy is generated across is made of your diet.

Feed a body linoleic acid, the dominant fat in sunflower, soybean, corn and rapeseed oil, and it goes into that membrane. Linoleic acid oxidises readily, and it is now sitting in the one place in the cell with the most oxygen and the most electron traffic going past it. When it goes, it damages the proteins around it and breaks down into aldehydes that attack the mitochondrial enzymes themselves.

The energy plant is being rebuilt out of a material that degrades under the exact conditions it has to work in. Not poisoned in a dose. Rebuilt, slowly, out of the wrong stuff, across forty years.

Before 1911 that fat barely existed in the human food supply. It is now the most consumed fat in the Western diet.

The generation that took the Blitz was running on beef fat and butter, and the clinics built for them stood empty.

We are the best fed, safest, most medicated people in British history, and we cannot get through a Tuesday.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Human height maps onto land that will not grow a vegetable, and the best farmland on earth grows the smallest people standing on it.

Tallest young men: the Netherlands, Montenegro, Estonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dairy, pork, lamb, sour milk, cured fat.

Tallest young women: the Netherlands, Montenegro, Denmark, Iceland. Butter, cheese, fish, skyr.

Longest lived in Europe: Italy, Sweden, Spain. Meat consumption at or near the top of the continent.

Shortest and sickest: the maize belts, the rice belts and the pulse belts, on land that grows three crops a year.

Guatemalan women are the shortest in the world. Volcanic soil, three harvests a year, maize and beans for four thousand years, and half the children stunted.

The land is magnificent. The diet is what the entire development sector recommends.

Dutch women are the tallest in the world. Reclaimed seabed, a sky that will not ripen much of anything, and a country that turned itself over to grass and cattle because grass and cattle were what the ground would carry.

In 1860 they were among the shortest people in Europe. They added twenty centimetres on milk.

Then the money objection, which is the only serious one. Montenegro has the second tallest men and the second tallest women on the planet on a fifth of the Dutch income, standing on limestone that grows sheep and very little else.

They beat Germany. They beat Switzerland. They beat every wealthy country on earth except one, on lamb, sour milk and smoked fat, off ground nobody would plough.

Not one nation at the top of any of those lists got there on the diet currently being recommended to it.

The correlation is so clean that a man could work it out from a doorframe and a map, which is roughly how everybody's grandmother did it.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

A US senator walked up to an airport checkpoint and refused to have his face scanned.

His name is Jeff Merkley. He is the senator from Oregon. He has spent three years trying to get the TSA to tell travelers something the TSA already admits on its own website.

The face scan at the checkpoint is optional. Almost nobody is told.

There is one sentence that stops it. Here is the sentence, and everything the TSA does not want you to know about saying it.

First, the TSA's own words. From the TSA website:

"Travelers who do not wish to participate in the facial recognition technology process may decline the optional photo, without recourse, in favor of an alternative identity verification process, which does not use facial recognition technology to verify their identity."

Optional photo. Without recourse. Those are their words, not mine.

The TSA also says this on the same page:

"Travelers will not lose their place in line for security screening."

And using the alternative method "does not take longer."

So the two things a TSA agent might tell you at the checkpoint, that you will hold up the line or take longer, are ruled out by the TSA's own website.

Now the sentence. When you get to the checkpoint, before the scan, say this:

"I do not consent to the scan and would like to have my ID manually verified."

That is it.

The officer will take your physical ID, either a driver's license or a passport, and check the photo against your face the way they did for the last twenty years. Merkley has documented himself doing this on flights between DC and Portland.

Here is why almost no one knows.

Senator Merkley has been pushing this since July 2023. He went to Reagan Washington National Airport that summer to publicly demonstrate the opt-out and to challenge the TSA on how the program is being run. The Washington Post covered it.

In May 2025, Merkley introduced the Traveler Privacy Protection Act with Senators John Kennedy of Louisiana, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Roger Marshall of Kansas. Two Republicans, two Democrats. The bill is endorsed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Public Citizen, and three other watchdog groups.

Merkley's own words from that press release:

"Folks don't want a national surveillance state, but that's exactly what the TSA's unchecked expansion of facial recognition technology is leading us to."

And:

"Americans have the right to opt out of using TSA's facial recognition at the airport, and we need to protect that right. Our Traveler Privacy Protection Act safeguards the freedoms and privacy of all Americans by making sure no one is required to have their face scanned to travel."

Here is what the TSA is planning.

Facial recognition is currently at more than 84 US airports. The TSA plans to expand it to more than 430. That is nearly every commercial airport in the country. And per the bill's findings, the TSA is "eventually planning to make this technology mandatory for all travelers."

Right now it is optional. That window is closing.

The TSA says the technology is not being abused. Their exact wording:

"Biometrics are not used for surveillance. Facial recognition technology is solely used to automate the current manual ID credential checking process and will not be used for surveillance or any law enforcement purpose."

Take them at their word. The point is not that the TSA is doing something illegal. The point is you get to choose.

Here is the 5-minute action you can take tonight, before your next flight.

- Memorize the sentence: "I do not consent to the scan and would like to have my ID manually verified."

- Have your physical ID out and ready. Driver's license or passport. Not a screenshot on your phone.

- When you get to the podium, hand the agent your ID and say the sentence in a normal tone. Do not apologize.

- If the agent pushes back or tells you it will take longer, calmly repeat the sentence. If they still refuse, ask for a supervisor.

- This applies to TSA checkpoints only. International arrivals into the US go through Customs and Border Protection, which is a different agency with different rules. For most US domestic flights, the sentence above is what you need.

Here is the last thing.

The TSA already admits, on its own website, that this is optional. A sitting US senator has spent three years asking them to put that in plain sight at the checkpoint. They have not. The signs at the podium do not tell you. The agents often do not tell you. The airline app does not tell you.

Congress is being lobbied by the airlines to keep it that way. Reuters reported in July 2025 that the airline industry publicly opposed Merkley's bill.

Right now, before the 430 airport rollout, you still have a one-sentence way out.

Say the sentence. Show your ID. Walk through.